Bad Advice

After reading Michael Miner's piece on the Chicago Tribune's new advice columnist [Hot Type, July 18], I was still curious about how Amy Dickinson got the job. So I turned to Seth Mnookin's Newsweek interview with Dickinson (www.msnbc.com/news/936790.asp), which Miner quoted briefly. There I found what I should have expected, I suppose: a decent track record as a columnist and commentator, some varied life experiences, good answers to a few sample letters. Then I read what Dickinson disliked most about trying to meet a guy on-line: "I hated the way people wrote and I was really judgmental about people using proper punctuation." Hasn't Dickinson or anyone in Tribune management considered that this alone makes her extraordinarily ill-suited for giving advice to people she'll know only through their writing?